Comments on: What’s the story with Photoshop & multi-core?

By: Henrik Tived

Henrik Tived — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 17:26:21 +0000

Searching the net high and low for Photoshop performance and what makes Photoshop tick?
So, what makes Photoshop tick in 2010 on both windows and mac based computers.
On the CPU side, is it more Cores or higher Ghz? On the GPU side of things we see a strong advertising from Adobe to promote nVidia’s CX Quadro cards for their CUDA performance, but will games cards (GT-295) give you the same or better performance for less $? Is ATI/AMD even a contender in this?
Where is the bottleneck in the system, be it Mac or PC, could it be the hard drives, and if so will the SSD drives be the answer for this? Reading Joseph Holmes notes on this, there was a bit of a surprise if I read it right, given the smaller byte size used on the scratch disk, the SSD drives was able to take full advantage of their potential. But all this is now a few years old.
So where are we today, when we want to have the best tool to work on, when Photoshop is the tool of choice.
Sorry to wake up this old thread :-) but I would love hear if someone has the answer for this.
I hope this will be interesting for everyone involved.
Thanks for taking the time
Henrik Tived

By: puzzled-illustrator

puzzled-illustrator — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 10:11:37 +0000

really useful info! I’d love to have your opinion on something specific. I am a freelance illustrator and photoshop is a tool I use on a daily basis. Thing is, 95% of my work in photoshop is with the brush (custom brushes, brush parameters etc.)
since I am mostly painting. (oh and lots of layers too.)I am working usually with A3-300dpi files or something close to it.
I recently decided to upgrade my hardware and after checking out the new mac pros I realized there isn’t a big difference in price between quad 2.6 and 8-core 2.2
Considering my main use for photoshop what would you recommend?
Does the brush engine benefits from higher CPU speeds or multi cores?
and if not now, is it possible that it will in future versions of PS?

By: Scottmontreal

Scottmontreal — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 19:01:51 +0000

I use an ‘old’ laptop – ‘with and AMD Semperon CPU and went from 1 to 2 gigs of RAM without any noticeable difference. The CPU seems to strain & run hot regardless. I want to upgrade for photo-editing on a budget. Given equal RAM, is there an appreciable difference between the AMD Athlon X 2, AMD Turion 64 X2, Intel Pentium Duo Core and the Intel Core 2 Duo?

By: Jeff

Jeff — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 10:17:40 +0000

WRT multi-processors, the new MacPro in particular... wouldn't you say that even though Photoshop isn't necessarily taking advantage of all those cores in the same way that video rendering does... that if you yourself are a multitasker the 8 cores are much better for you than 4 cores. If you're burning a DVD, downloading some music, and Photoshopping at the same time for example. [Yes, I think that's probably reasonable. It's similar to what I tell people about RAM: although Photoshop does not address more than 4GB of RAM directly, it's still useful to have more RAM available for the OS and other apps, not to mention for PS to address through OS caching. On my laptop right now, Safair is eating up ~500MB (!) of real memory and 1.7GB (!!) of virtual memory. So, having extra resources around is generally a Good Thing. --J.]

By: James

James — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 16:17:50 +0000

A little confused after reading the support pages of Adobe.com. Specifically: Processor speed "[...]Photoshop requires a G3 or faster processor. Photoshop can also take advantage of multiprocessor systems (that is, systems that have two or more PowerPC processors), which are much faster than a single-processor system. All Photoshop features are faster on a multiprocessor system, and some features are much faster." link [Yeah--that seems a little overstated. I'll try to get more info to clarify. The reality, as I understand it, is that some operations wouldn't make sense to split up across multiple cores, so Photoshop doesn't do it. That's why if PS is doing something and not pegging both of your processors, it's not true that the app is running badly & failing to take advantage of your hardware. --J.]

By: Chris Ogden

Chris Ogden — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 09:24:43 +0000

So are we understanding correctly that as landscape photographers for Apple MacPros:
1) their entry level video will perform for 2D PS CS3 as well as the others?
2) the new 8core machine will NOT provide any significant real-world performance advantages for PS CS3?
3) or would 8core help with Adobe RAW 4.0 and processing in 16bit images plus the handful of filters: Photozoom, Shadows/Hilights, Noise Ninja , Nik Sharpener Pro).
Searching the usual sites show no CS3 to CS3 benchmarks on MacPros (eg barefeats.com, xlr8yourmac.com, etc.)
[I just saw the news about the new systems, and I don't know what CS3 benchmarks exist. I'll look for more info. --J.]

By: R. Alan McFarland

R. Alan McFarland — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 20:50:00 +0000

I do “normal” photoshop editing on large landscape files. If I get a new dual core PC… what advantage would I see adding a second dual core processor? Or even more simply… do people see a large speed increase with the first dual core over a single core?
Thanks, Alan
[A variety of operations will be sped up, but I don't have a list off the top of my head. I'd suggest seeking out Photoshop benchmarks on representative systems (e.g. on Ars Technica, Macworld, etc.). Keep in mind that other components--RAM and scratch disk speed in particular--also affect performance. --J.]

By: Fazal Majid

Fazal Majid — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 19:49:20 +0000

Interesting article. I did not realize the healing brush used 4th-order partial differential equations to reconstruct textures, that’s pretty impressive.
Memory bandwidth is the achilles heel of Intel processors. They still haven’t switched from the slow shared memory bus, and sort of paper over the problem by using massive amounts of cache to compensate. In comparison the switched architecture used by either the G5 or AMD Opterons and Athlon64s is far superior, but you still need to have an OS that gives you fine-grained control over processor affinity, and few desktop OSes if any do so. The benchmark that allows you to measure memory performance is the STREAM benchmark, which is included in Xbench.

By: john gould

john gould — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 13:17:34 +0000

If I understand what you are saying, then would it be fair to sumarise as: It is more important to have fast memory and a fast bus than having lots of processor cores? [I'll try to get a better/deeper answer on this, but my take is that it's not a question of one being more important than the other. Rather, it's kind of like a factory: you have to get the materials in and out efficiently, and you have to process them efficiently. Relative slowness in either one can be a bottleneck. As the ratios between the two change, we need to think of new ways to tune the app to take advantage of the new systems. Simply doing the same operations likely won't be good enough. --J.]

By: Chris Cox

Chris Cox — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 09:26:42 +0000

No, the Core Duo chips do nothing to solve the bandwidth problems.
Unfortunately, when CPU makers cite speedups they’re talking about extremely compute limited operations (ray tracing, numerical simulation, etc.). They don’t tell you that you’ve got 4 times the compute capability but still have the same size data pipe as the single core chip. (leaving the extra cores starved for data most of the time).

By: Joe Matzger

Joe Matzger — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 07:09:45 +0000

This is very timely. We had a discussion on our production floor about this and we were split evenly.
The optimization guides are very helpful in a mixed environment.
I want to thank you for the this post. I was unaware of the blog until cnet pointed to it.
Thanks again.
[Cool--glad to hear it. --J.]

By: Michael Hoffman

Michael Hoffman — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 07:14:07 +0000

John
Thanks so much for your ongoing insights into things Adobe, et al.
[My pleasure; thanks for checking 'em out. --J.]
Question: does CS3 utilize the “Core Image” of Mac OSX and the GPU of the computer video card (especially in turn of the century G4 Macs)?
[No, Photoshop does not use Core Image. --J.]
Happy New Year
[Thanks, and same to you! --J.]

By: Rick McCleary

Rick McCleary — Sat, 30 Dec 2006 09:50:33 +0000

Thanks for this peek behind the curtain.
One question – is the essential message here that an 8-core Intel machine offers only a modest speed bump (if any) over a 4-core Intel machine when being used for Photoshop work? For example – Shadow/Highlight would benefit, but not Gaussian Blur?
[Let me ping Russell for info. --J.]

By: Jeffrey Snover

Jeffrey Snover — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 19:53:25 +0000

> Intel-based architectures don't necessarily add memory bandwidth as they add cores. Is this the issue that dogged Intel's early Dual-cores and got addressed by the DUO architecture? [I don't know, but I'll pass the question to Russell & Scott. --J.]

By: Jerry Kolata

Jerry Kolata — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 12:00:30 +0000

John, Russell, thanks for all of the explanations, but I wonder if you can provide specific examples of machine configurations that provide the best performance for Photoshop? Which CPU, how much memory, which disk drive configurations for both PC and MAC?? Thanks! [Jerry, I'd start with the overviews in the support pages of Adobe.com; check out the performance optimization guides for Windows and Mac. You can also Google "optimizing Photoshop" to get more leads. --J.]